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FBI's Facebook Monitoring Leads To Arrest In England

Posted by timothy on from the bomb-president-motorcade-rutabaga dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that armed police were called to a UK school earlier today after being advised of a potential threat by the FBI. The school stated that the FBI 'raised the alarm after Internet scanning software picked up a suspicious combination of words,' strongly implying that they are carrying out routine, automated surveillance of social networking sites. While in this case it does appear that there may have been a genuine threat, the story nonetheless raises significant privacy concerns."

11 of 329 comments (clear)

  1. Privacy? Really? by kid_wonder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Does someone out there thinks there is an expectation of privacy for data they post on the internet?

    I thought that was exactly what you should NOT expect.

    --

    "Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
    1. Re:Privacy? Really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
      From timothy and other bat shit insane malcontents:

      story nonetheless raises significant privacy concerns

      Bullshit. Facebook posting is not private. There is no 'privacy' involved here. No mail was opened. No phone tapped. No email account rifled through. There may be other issues to address regarding whatever wholesale analysis the cops are performing, but there are no 'privacy' issues here. The kid put it out there for the world to pick up on, automated word-eater or otherwise. End of 'privacy' issues.

      if he writes a note theatening (sic) bullies so that they don't ruin the last day of school for him

      Since we're talking hypotheticals; If such a note is presented to police and they fail to follow up and/or arrest the author and he then carries out the act do we then condemn the police or defer to your finely tuned sense of justice and celebrate our civil liberties?

      essentially boils down to a thought crime

      Bullshit. Public threats are not thoughts. Here's a big fat clue in case you're confused about the legalities.

    2. Re:Privacy? Really? by MachDelta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      People have no fucking idea what "privacy" is anymore. They've given up so much of it with Facebook, Twitter, loyalty programs, etc that no one seems to care about losing more or taking that of someone else. And if you try to explain things to them, they just look at you like you have two heads and give you that good old line: "What do you have to hide?" Any attempt to reason it out with them results in indifference: "You're just paranoid." Privacy is taking it's final few breaths because the collective fat, lazy ass of western culture has sat on it and doesn't even realize what's being smothered to death beneath its cellulite inflated cheeks. Too fucking bad for those of us who cared, we just saw it too late to make a difference. /rant of a guy now labeled "paranoid" and "suspicious" by various acquaintances because he blew up when his cellphone was temporarily "borrowed" by an (ex) friend so they could rifle through my text message history "for fun".
      *Grumble*

    3. Re:Privacy? Really? by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The internet/facebook are a public commons. Just like the street in front of the school. If a police officer was parked in his car outside of a school and a kid came walking down the middle of the street screaming "I'm going to kill every mother fucker in that school" I don't think we would question the police officers judgment if he stop the kid questioned him. We don't know what the arrest was for, nor do we know what the laws in that particular area are. The police may have gone to question him and found his room full of pipe bombs and sawed off shotguns... or it may just be illegal in that area to threaten to massacre a school. Remember, this kid publicly posted his name, his school, and his intent to harm those in the school. It's not like the government went out of their way to decipher the boys identity. Now if the kid sent an email to his friend and the FBI intercepted the email via packet sniffing and what-not, maybe I'd have a problem with it.

    4. Re:Privacy? Really? by Merls+the+Sneaky · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unless you're muslim, those fuckers do it all the time.
      http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/apr/22/south-park-censored-fatwa-muhammad
      There is one example with 1.0 seconds of google, I will leave it as an exercise for karma whores to find other notable examples.

    5. Re:Privacy? Really? by MachDelta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Oh, I am fully capable of protecting my privacy on my own... if I want to live in a mud hut on a desert island.

      I get your point, but the simple fact is if anyone wants to take part in "modern society" they have to abide by it's rules and norms; even if those very rules and norms require your photo, fingerprints, DNA, fetishes, psych profile, and rectal bacteria cultures just so the we can make sure you aren't a "terrer'ist" or some weirdo who doesn't like having their entire personal life on display like some fucking monkey in a zoo.

      So to answer your question: yes, the other ignorant plebs ARE curtailing my ability to protect my privacy. Their ignorance is societies ignorance. And while I can ignore an ignorant person, unfortunately I still have to bow to an ignorant society.

  2. They're damned if they do, damned if they don't by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Every time some idiot goes and posts somewhere "I'm gonna kill people" and it isn't caught, the news is "They were posting it for all the world to see, why didn't somebody stop them!?"
    Then some idiot is caught from his posting, and the new is "How dare the police read posts!?"

    While I don't believe in prior restraint and so I worry about arresting people based on things they said they might do, Facebook is the new equivalent of painting signs on the water tower. If ever anything didn't qualify for 'expectation of privacy', a service where the express purpose is to tell other people what you're doing should be it. As long as some additional police work goes into verifying that the threat is real, I think this is a good thing.

  3. Privacy? How? by Triv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "the story nonetheless raises significant privacy concerns."

    ...How? The kid made threats of violence on a public forum, somebody called the FBI, the FBI called Scotland Yard and they apprehended the kid before he made it to school. Sounds to me like the system worked for once.

    I know it's all the rage right now to automatically link Facebook with "Privacy Concerns," but in this case it's just asinine.

  4. Re:Trolling, trolling by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 5, Funny

    Anybody who know, or knows, how to use a BBS should be considered a criminal because that's where the hackers get their anarchist cookbooks and pixellated bitmaps of Heather Lochlear nude and phone-phreak boxes and Jolly Roger Cap'n Crunch whistles to illegally steal long-distance phone calls.

  5. Re:Trolling, trolling by dave562 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You forgot the part where you posted a picture of a firearm to go with your rant about bullies. Nice job of cherry picking the parts of story that fit your rant while ignoring the obvious threat. Last I checked it was next to impossible to get a firearm in the UK, so the fact that a kid who was having problems with bullies posted a picture of him with a firearm and POTENTIALLY menancing words warranted a closer investigation.

    Put the shoe on the other foot. What if some kid had gone on a rampage and it later came out that the FBI thought he might have been a threat but decided not to share the information? Rather than worrying about someone's rights being trampled (and I'd argue that they weren't given that he posted in a PUBLIC forum visible to the world), we'd be condemning the FBI for not doing more to save the children.

  6. I undestood this was from 4Chan, not Facebook by Mattniche · · Score: 5, Informative

    According to this image I saw 5 days before that BBC story.

    http://www.photo-pimp.com/dgnr8/lost/drf.jpg

    Odd.